; it was the best range in the country.
Look at the grass here, and look at it outside of that fence."

"I think it's better here because it's been fenced and grazed lightly so
long."

"Well, they didn't have any right to fence it."

"Cutting it won't make it any better now."

"I don't care, I'll cut it again! If I had my way about it I'd drive our
cattle in here where they've got a right to be."

"I don't understand the feeling of you people in this country against
fences; I came from a place where everybody's got them. But I suppose
it's natural, if you could get down to the bottom of it."

"If there's one thing unnatural, it's a fence," she said.

They rode on a little way, saying nothing more. Then she:

"I thought the man they call the Duke of Chimney Butte was working on
this side of the ranch?"

"That's a nickname they gave me over at the Syndicate when I first
struck this country. It doesn't mean anything at all."

"I thought you were his partner," she said.

"No, I'm the monster himself."

She looked at him quickly, very close to smiling.

"Well, you don't look so terrible, after all. I think a man like you
would be ashamed to have a woman boss over him."

"I hadn't noticed it, Miss Kerr."

"She told you about me," she charged, with resentful stress.

"No."

So they rode on, their thoughts between them, a word, a silence, nothing
worth while said on either side, coming presently to the gap she had
made in the wire.

"I thought you'd hand me over to the sheriff," she told him, between
banter and defiance.

"They say you couldn't get a conviction on anything short of cattle
stealing in this part of the country, and doubtful on that. But I
wouldn't give you over to the sheriff, Miss Kerr, even if I caught you
driving off a cow."

"What would you do?" she asked, her head bent, her voice low.

"I'd try to argue you out of the cow first, and then teach you better,"
he said, with such evident seriousness that she turned her face away, he
thought to hide a smile.

She stopped her horse between the dangling ends of wire. Her long braid
of black hair was swinging down her back to her cantle, her hard ride
having disarranged its cunning deceit beneath her hat until it drooped
over her ears and blew in loose strands over her dark, wildly piquant
face, out of which the hard lines of defiance had not quite melted.

She was not as handsome as Vesta Philbrook, he admitted, but there was
something